The fight over curbing President Donald Trump’s ability to freeze cash is now the make-or-break dispute as leading lawmakers close in on a deal to avert a government shutdown next month.
Top appropriators on both sides of the Capitol reported good progress Monday night toward a bipartisan deal on overall spending totals for the military and non-defense programs, with a shutdown deadline looming on March 14. But House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said Democrats’ insistence on adding conditions to stop Trump from withholding funding that Congress already appropriated could foil a final agreement.
“I think we’ve moved a long way on the numbers. We’re very close. I would say essentially there,” Cole told reporters. “The real question is conditions on presidential action. And look, there’s no way a Republican Senate and Republican House are going to limit what a Republican president can do.”
Republicans can pass a funding deal in the House without Democratic support, but they’ll need at least seven Democrats to back it in the Senate. And Cole acknowledged it would be “very difficult” to pass a stopgap funding patch even through the House with only Republican votes. But if House Republicans could rally a majority of their conference to vote for a funding bill in the face of a Democratic ultimatum over Trump’s authority, it would be easier to blame Democrats for spurring a funding lapse, the Oklahoma Republican added.
“Then we could probably credibly argue: We didn’t shut down the government, the other guys did,” Cole said. “But I don’t want to have that argument. I want to get to a deal still.”
Cole and the dozen Republican lawmakers who chair his panel’s subcommittees plan to meet Tuesday with Speaker Mike Johnson to talk about Democrats’ latest offer in the private negotiations, the Oklahoma Republican said.
“It really is now down to presidential powers,” Cole said, adding that “nobody can make a deal if our leaders don’t support the deal” and that he is “certainly not interested in sending a bill to the president that he’s not willing to sign.”
Across the Capitol, the Senate’s top appropriators met privately Monday night. “We’re making good progress,” Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the chamber’s top Democratic appropriator, said as she left Appropriations Chair Susan Collins’ office. The Maine Republican delivered a similar readout.
Congress will likely need at least a short-term stopgap to extend the funding deadline, Collins said, even if leaders can reach an overall deal this week. From there, appropriators would need to reach a bipartisan agreement on a dozen totals for each of the individual annual funding measures and then hash out the specifics of those bills, a process that usually takes at least a month.
But the Senate Appropriations chair is “absolutely” opposed to a so-called “full-year” stopgap funding patch, also known as a continuing resolution or a CR, that would keep federal agencies running on current budgets through September.
“A full-year CR would lock in the Biden administration’s priorities, rather than the bills that we negotiated in committee on a bipartisan basis,” Collins said.
And there’s another potential wrinkle: Top appropriators have been seeking clarity from Trump’s budget office to make sure they avoid triggering across-the-board funding cuts. Those reductions were baked into the two-year budget deal enacted in 2023 in an effort to motivate Congress to stop relying on stopgap funding bills.
Cole has received “verbal assurance” from Trump’s budget office that a stopgap through September would not cause any sequestration cuts, he said. “But I don’t have a piece of paper that says that, and I wouldn’t trust it until I do,” he added.
